William James

Pre-reading

William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher, psychologist and physician who was known as one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century. James is believed to be one of the most influential American philosophers. He is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey (2002) ranked James as the 14th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.

James’ work influenced many, including Presidents. On April 17, 1977, President Jimmy Carter made the speech “Moral Equivalent of War”, equating the United States’ 1970s crisis in energy and the changes and sacrifices Carter’s proposed plans would require with the “moral equivalent of war”. The speech may have borrowed the title of James’ classic essay The Moral Equivalent of War, and much of its theme and the memorable phrase derived from his last speech, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, in which James considered one of the classic problems of politics: how to sustain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of war.

Prompts for Your Reading

1.According to James, “There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war.” Find out what is in his mind.

2.If it is understandable for ancient martial tribes to enjoy hunting, then why are modern men fascinated by the wars?

3.What does the author want to tell us when he describes the Peloponnesian war?

4.What is the cruelty like in the Roman conquest of Greece?

5.James says, “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.” What does this mean?

6.What does the author mean by “present-day civilized opinion” of war and peace?

7.How do some people argue in favor of the necessity of war?

8.What roles do morals and virtues play in wars?

9.What is “the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime”? (Think of the two unwillingnesses that follow this topic.)

10.What is the relationship of pride and shame respectively with “collectivity”?

11.“I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.” What elements of army-discipline does the author have in mind?

12.What are other aspects, than martial virtues, of one’s country that come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame?

13.What does James mean by “the army enlisted against Nature”?

14.What are some of the moral equivalents of war according to the author?

[1] The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy’s injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now thought permissible.

[2] It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.

[3] Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war-taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

[4] History is a bath of blood. The Iliad1 is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax2, Sarpedon3 and Hector4 killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.

[5] Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war5, for example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the “Venus of Milo” was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides6 gives in full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Matthew Arnold7.“The powerful exact what they can,” said the Athenians, “and the weak grant what they must.” When the Meleans say that sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians reply: “Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you.” Well, the Meleans still refused, and their town was taken. “The Athenians,” Thucydides quietly says, “thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the women and children. They then colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their own.”

[6] Alexander’s career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times is incredible. When Rome finally conquered Greece, Paulus Aemilius8 was told by the Roman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by “giving” them the old kingdom of Epirus9. They sacked seventy cities and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves. How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the senators, five hundred and fifty in number, Brutus10 was “the noblest Roman of them all”, but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of Philippi11 he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and Thessalonica12 to ravage, if they win the fight.

[7] Such was the gory nurse that trained soldiers to cohesiveness. We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war13 both governments began with bluff, but they couldn’t stay there; the military tension was too much for them. In 1898 our people had read the word WAR in letters three inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politician McKinley14 was swept away by their eagerness, and our squalid war with Spain became a reality.

[8] At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy. England and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without ceasing, are solely for “peace”. Germany and Japan it is who are bent on loot and glory. “Peace” in military mouths today is a synonym for “war expected”. The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu15. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace” interval.

[9] It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a sort of double personality. If we take European nations, no legitimate interest of any one of them would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacificism which set the militarist imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best utopian hypothesis, the most promising line of conciliation.

[10] In my remarks, pacificist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice to by many writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does anyone deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are the soul of every patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance. The militarily patriotic and romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep’s paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to reinvent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.

[11] Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zoophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities”, of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor anymore! Fie upon such a cattle yard of a planet!

[12] So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which everyone feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military characters in stock — if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection, — so that Roosevelt’s weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.

[13] This natural sort of feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of army-writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a biological or sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary psychological checks or motives. When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictitious. War is, in short, a permanent human obligation. General Homer Lea16, in his recent book the Valor of ignorance, plants himself squarely on this ground. Readiness for war is for him the essence of nationality, and ability in it the supreme measure of the health of nations.

[14] Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary — they must necessarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or decrepitude. Japan now is culminating; and by the fatal flaw in question it is impossible that her statesmen should not long since have entered, with extraordinary foresight, upon a vast policy of conquest — the game in which the first moves were her wars with China and Russia and her treaty with England, and of which the final objective is the capture of the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, and the whole of our Coast west of the Sierra Passes. This will give Japan what her ineluctable vocation as a state absolutely forces her to claim, the possession of the entire Pacific Ocean; and to oppose these deep designs we Americans have, according to our author, nothing but our conceit, our ignorance, our commercialism, our corruption, and our feminism. General Lea makes a minute technical comparison of the military strength which we at present could oppose to the strength of Japan, and concludes that the islands, Alaska, Oregon, and Southern California, would fall almost without resistance, that San Francisco must surrender in a fortnight to a Japanese investment, that in three or four months the war would be over, and our republic, unable to regain what it had heedlessly neglected to protect sufficiently, would then“disintegrate”, until perhaps some Caesar should arise to weld us again into a nation.

[15] A dismal forecast indeed! Yet not implausible, if the mentality of Japan’s statesmen be of the Caesarian type of which history shows us so many examples, and which is all that General Lea seems able to imagine. But there is no reason to think that women can no longer be the mothers of Napoleonic or Alexandrian characters; and if these come in Japan and find their opportunity, just such surprises as “the Valor of ignorance” paints may lurk in ambush for us. Ignorant as we still are of the innermost recesses of Japanese mentality, we may be foolhardy to disregard such possibilities.

[16] Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their considerations. The“Philosophie des Krieges”, by S. R. Steinmetz17 is a good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor — there isn’t a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn’t tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht (“The unfolding of history is the unfolding of right.”); and Dr. Steinmetz does not believe that in the long run chance and luck play any part in apportioning the issues.

[17] The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military competition; but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal is comparable to its winnowing. Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is “degeneration”.

[18] Dr. Steinmetz is a conscientious thinker, and his book, short as it is, takes much into account. Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed up in Simon Patten18’s words, that mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and that the transition to a “pleasure-economy” may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defense against its degenerative influences. If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.

[19] Turn the fear over as I will in my mind, it all seems to lead back to two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one esthetic, and the other moral: unwillingness, first to envisage a future in which army-life, with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided quickly, thrillingly, and tragically, by force, but only gradually and insipidly by “evolution”; and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme theatre of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never show themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than other esthetic and ethical insistencies have, it seems to me, to be listened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by mere counter-insistency on war’s expensiveness and horror. The horror makes the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremest and supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. The weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident — pacificism makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace-economy.

[20] Pacificists ought to enter more deeply into the esthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy, says J. J. Chapman, then move the point, and your opponent will follow. So long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded. Tolstoy’s pacificism is the only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world’s values, and makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this world’s values; and instead of the fear of the Lord and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear of poverty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic literature with which I am acquainted. Even in Lowes Dickinson19’s exquisite dialogue, high wages and short hours are the only forces invoked for overcoming man’s distaste for repulsive kinds of labor. Meanwhile men at large still live as they always have lived, under a pain-and-fear economy — for those of us who live in an ease-economy are but an island in the stormy ocean — and the whole atmosphere of present-day utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life’s more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority.

[21] Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the key-note of the military temper. “Dogs, would you live forever?” shouted Frederick the Great20.“Yes,”say our utopians, “let us live forever, and raise our level gradually.” The best thing about our“inferiors” today is that they are as tough as nails, and physically and morally almost as insensitive. Utopianism would see them soft and squeamish, while militarism would keep their callousness, but transfigure it into a meritorious characteristic, needed by “the service”, and redeemed by that from the suspicion of inferiority. All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride; but it has to be confessed that the only sentiment which the image of pacific cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of arousing in countless worthy breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to such a collectivity. It is obvious that the United States of America as they exist today impress a mind like General Lea’s as so much human blubber. Where is the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one’s own or another’s? Where is the savage “yes” and “no”, the unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?

[22] Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that warmaking is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.

[23] All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.

[24] The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men now are proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one’s country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not someday feel that it is worth a blood tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark till the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

[25] Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnelmaking, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly; the women would value them more highly; they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

[26] Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life. I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

[27] The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper. H. G. Wells21, as usual, sees the centre of the situation.“In many ways,” he says, “military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment or research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of today, for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of today is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now for such superannuated things.”

[28] Wells adds that he thinks that the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley22’s party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of “Meat! Meat!” and that of the “general-staff” of any civilized nation. History has seen the latter interval bridged over: the former one can be bridged over much more easily.

Notes

1.Iliad: Greek epic poem (attributed to Homer) describing the siege of Troy

2.Diomedes and Ajax: mythical Greek heroes who fought against Troy

3.Sarpedon: (Greek mythology) a son of Zeus who became king of Lycia; he fought on behalf of the Trojans in the Trojan War and was killed by Patroclus.

4.Hector: (Greek mythology) a mythical Trojan who was killed by Achilles during the Trojan War

5.the Peloponnesian war: (431 B.C.-404 B.C.) a war in which Athens and its allies were defeated by the league centered on Sparta

6.Thucydides: (460 B.C.-400 B.C.) ancient Greek historian remembered for his history of the Peloponnesian War

7.Matthew Arnold: (1822-1888) English poet and literary critic

8.Paulus Aemilius: (229 B.C.-160 B.C.) a two-time consul of the Roman Republic and a noted general who conquered Macedon putting an end to the Antigonid dynasty

9.Epirus: an ancient area on the Ionian Sea that flourished as a kingdom in the 3rd century B. C.; located in northwestern Greece and southern Albania

10.Brutus: (85 B.C.-42 B.C.) statesman of ancient Rome who (with Cassius) led a conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar

11.Philippi: a city in ancient Macedonia

12.Thessalonica: a port city in northeastern Greece on an inlet of the Aegean Sea

13.the Boer war: either of two wars, the first when the Boers fought England in order to regain the independence they had given up to obtain British help against the Zulus(1880-1881); the second when the Orange Free State and Transvaal declared war on Britain (1899-1902)

14.McKinley: (1843-1901) 25th President of the United States; was assassinated by an anarchist

15.now in posse, now in actu: either potentially or in reality

16.Homer Lea: (1876-1912) American adventurer, author and geopolitical strategist. He is today best known for his involvement with Chinese reform and revolutionary movements in the early twentieth century and as a close advisor to Dr. Sun Yat-sen during the 1911 Chinese Republican revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty, and for his writings about China and geopolitics.

17.Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz: (1862-1940) Dutch sociologist

18.Simon Patten: (1852-1922) economist and chair of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Patten was one of the first economists to posit a shift from an “economics of scarcity” to an “economics of abundance”; that is, he believed that soon there would be enough wealth to satisfy people’s basic needs and that the economy would shift from an emphasis on production to consumption.

19.Lowes Dickinson: (1862-1932) English historian and political activist and noted pacifist

20.Frederick the Great: (1712-1786) king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 who brought Prussia military prestige by winning the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War

21.H. G. Wells: (1866-1946) English writer best known for his science-fiction novels; he also wrote on contemporary social problems and popular accounts of history and science.

22.Henry Morton Stanley: (1841-1904) Welsh journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. He once wrote that “the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision”.

Questions for Further Thinking

1.If a war is fought because either of glory or of shame, can you think of any wars in history that were related to the two causes?

2.“History is a bath of blood,” the author describes, and “the Greek mind fed upon the story”. Is it human nature to enjoy fighting and killing? If not, then why do lots of people like war games or war movies?

3.In the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians said, “The powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.” What lessons can we learn from this concept?

4.James referred to war as “the gory nurse that trained soldiers to cohesiveness”. Think of the cooperation between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party during the Anti-Japanese War. What made both sides come together?

5.In James’ eyes, what are the higher aspects of militaristic sentiment?

6.What does the author mean by saying “there is no reason to think that women can no longer be the mothers of Napoleonic or Alexandrian characters”?

7.How much truth do you think there is in the statement “Mankind was nursed in pain and fear”?

8.If a civilized powerful country should solve their problems by fighting against nature rather than weaker countries, what should the weaker countries do with their own problems?

9.The author says, “Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.” Think about some wars in recent history, especially those started by the U.S.A. and find out some possible excuses for the wars.

10.Militarist authors regard war as a biological or sociological necessity, a permanent human obligation. How would you respond to such views?

11.How would you relate the Chinese “peaceful development” ideal with James’ moral equivalent of war?

12.“Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary — they must necessarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or decrepitude.” If this statement is true, what can we learn from it? Can you think of any examples either in history or from the world today to support this opinion?

After-reading Assignment

Oral Work

1.Read about Hitler and find out how he became a fascist leader in favor of war. Share your findings and comments with your classmates.

2.With materials from history books and movies etc., work in groups of four and exchange information about the Roman Conquest and its influence on the world.

3.Work with your partner and analyze the idea that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. Will there be such a day finally when no wars will be? Why or why not? State the results of your analysis to your class.

4.Work in groups of four and research into state leaders’ thoughts on wars. Different groups may be in charge of states on different continents. Then each group chooses a spokesperson to report the group’s findings and comments to other groups.

5.Prepare a list of “martial virtues” and a list of “non-martial virtues”. Exchange them with your classmates and discuss how we may draw from them for our own use.

Written Work

1.Wars in history far and near have caused devastation to human civilization. Conduct a research into the world’s losses of valuable properties caused by war. Write a brief report of your findings and tell how you feel about such losses.

2.In Paragraph 19, the author discusses the two “unwillingnesses”. Do you share similar feelings? Write a journal describing your responses to the two “unwillingnesses” and explain why or why not you feel the same unwillingnesses.

3.Some governments tend to create potential enemies abroad in order to evade internal trouble. Does the act of getting involved in a conflict or war abroad benefit domestic economic development? Write a critical essay of about 400 words stating your views.

4.“Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the key-note of the military temper.” Echoing such sentiment is a Chinese idiom that goes something like “nerve out of shame”, or “confront a person with threat of death and he will fight to live”. Prepare an essay of about 400 words justifying this idiom, especially for peace times.